Sleep walking into an Orwellian future!

[Lyle Brotherton]

Following on from The Guardian Newspaper’s revelations yesterday (06062013), that America’s largest mobile phone network operator, Verizon, has given the NSA (National security Agency) access to all the calls made and received by their customers, today it reports that the NSA has also obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook and Apple.

Anyone who thinks that the likes of these US internet giants and personal technology firms are acting in the interests of civil liberties is naive to say the least. Firstly they are American based firms owned in the main by Americans, subject to American laws, paying American taxes and most importantly their primary duty is to their shareholders, in other words profit. So when the American Administration, which defines the laws and tax rules, under which they operate, requests access to the data they hold, that in itself would be enough for most companies to acquiesce. However, when they gift them large sums of money for 'research' then profit determines their response.

Oh, and don’t be mistaken that we are not all affected, Google is a global search engine used across the globe, as is Facebook used globally and of course Apple’s iPhone has become ubiquitous.

Why is this important? For the reason that the Western World is going thru a paradigm shift, of monumental proportions, with potentially monumental consequences. Our economies continue to teeter on the edge as the underlying problems, which first caused the financial collapse, still have not been addressed and countries, such as China, who do not share our idea of democracy, will become the new world superpowers.

Food for thought as we sleep walk into the Orwellian future of our creation.

[Pete McK]

An interesting perspective Lyle and one with which, in the main, I agree.

Here are two interesting observations:

1. One of the modules we teach in the modern Geography GCSE syllabus is world demographics and these include the incident of diseases and mortality statistics. One of my pupils drew some interesting facts out of the UK Government’s Registrars Statistical Analysis 5 people per year are killed by bee or wasp stings, exactly the same amount, on average, of terrorist actions in the past decade.

The annualised average of five deaths caused by terrorism in England and Wales over this period compares with total accidental deaths in 2010 of 17,201, including 123 cyclists killed in traffic accidents, 102 personnel killed in Afghanistan, 29 people drowned in the bath.

So are our governments doing a great job in keeping the number of fatalities from acts of terrorism so low, or is it more about feeding our fears about terrorism and therefore making us feel we need government, whilst failing to address the real threat, the collapse of our economies?

2. My Grandfather took me aside recently at a family function, for a serious chat. He told me to make sure that I kept my debt to a minimum because he believes that we, that is the western world, are near to a big fall. He doesn’t know how or when, but near we are. He is a wise man, prudent, considerate and somebody I have always admired. His warning quite shook me.

[adi]

We have one of the top 3 security services on the planet, unfortunately it is also one of the most expensive. To be able to ring fence their annual expenditures the government needs to cause fear in the population to explain this cost.

The fact is the government has expanded our security services to include domestic crime and spying on its population. The security services are being used to monitor everything from cyber bullying, porn, child porn, civil disturbance and more traditional crimes. MI5 is nothing more than a digital police force now and we are completely unaware of this because the government do not report on the security services activities. It could be said that they are a digital stasi.

Just by watching porn online you are allowing yourself to be a target of the state. They keep a file on you. You send a text or an email it is recorded and kept. The fact that the home secretary has to authorise the collection of information on you if you are suspected to be involved in a crime is complete crap. The home secretary has to authorise the use of data already collected on you to be used in court.   

The news out of the state sound really shocking but the fact is the government must publish its laws so its population sometimes make a fuss and we get to hear about it. The same things happen here but the government does not have to tell a sole so they are going to keep it behind closed doors.

Our government is the most secretive on the planet and even worse if they want to introduce a new law there is no requirement to inform the public and if they do inform the public it is as a press release that can be hidden in that days news. 

[Callum]

Until relatively recently I would have read a thread like this and not given it much thought. Living in the Lakes and working outdoors I would describe myself as a Joe average. Like many of this forum, I have served in the Armed Forces and again I suspect like many, I have not linked the Nations security with the economy before, probably because my understanding of national economics is limited.

In the Army, intel was a major determinant in the protection of our troops and in the outcome of ops. In NI 14th Int and MI5 crossed the Rubicon of passive observation to active intervention. Detention of IRA members in H-block, white noise interrogation and the censorship of IRA words on our national television and media proved, in the end, ineffective. Indeed, the ramifications of even this small scale intrusion created as many problems on the ground as it purported to cure and in the long term they damaged the credibility of our security services.

Successive Governments have rapidly advanced our level of active intervention and out with our National borders. In the modern day crusade (The original Crusades were religiously motivated campaigns conducted between the 11th and 16th centuries of Christian against Muslims – sound familiar?) activities such as water-boarding, rendition and indefinite detention without trial have become the currency of our crusade. These facts alone should concern us because in a democracy our Government and it agencies are our elected representatives to do our bidding.

The stories that I hear from former colleagues still serving in the Army and deployed in Afghanistan are very different to the broad consensus of mission completion purported by our Government and the main stream media. The Russians entered Afghanistan to defeat the Mujahedeen and their rules of engagement were much blunter than ours. Their troop levels were substantially more than ours and yet they failed in their mission. The British and Allied Forces have also failed in its mission, not only in military objectives, but more so that Afghanistan, like Iraq before it, has become immensely more of a threat to the west in that we have stirred up a hornets nest producing men and women to join their crusade. If we had not invaded Iraq and Afghanistan would the threat from radicalised Muslims be as large as it is today? I believe there is only one answer to this question.

So maybe Adi and other contributors have a point, if our Government can’t protect us from the global economy, and all my common sense tells me they are not, then they need to be seen protecting us from something else and that something is the Muslim threat. It is a bit like Nero playing his fiddle whilst Rome burned.

[Skills4Survival]

Any..US Company, inside OR outside the US is bound under several Acts and Laws which allow them to have access to anything. So..if you buy office 365, you are a customer of Microsoft, therefor your Microsoft related data to that service is basically owned by the US.  The amount of data which is gather everyday to assess runs into the many Petabytes, all analysed based on certain patterns. If you want to have an idea of the magnitude and sophistication of cybercrime, take a look on BLACK CODE: inside the battle for cyberspace. Just to get a feel of it
http://canadaam.ctvnews.ca/video?playlistId=1.1299886

Following on from The Guardian Newspaper’s revelations yesterday (06062013), that America’s largest mobile phone network operator, Verizon, has given the NSA (National security Agency) access to all the calls made and received by their customers, today it reports that the NSA has also obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook and Apple.

Anyone who thinks that the likes of these US internet giants and personal technology firms are acting in the interests of civil liberties is naive to say the least. Firstly they are American based firms owned in the main by Americans, subject to American laws, paying American taxes and most importantly their primary duty is to their shareholders, in other words profit. So when the American Administration, which defines the laws and tax rules, under which they operate, requests access to the data they hold, that in itself would be enough for most companies to acquiesce. However, when they gift them large sums of money for 'research' then profit determines their response.

Oh, and don’t be mistaken that we are not all affected, Google is a global search engine used across the globe, as is Facebook used globally and of course Apple’s iPhone has become ubiquitous.

Why is this important? For the reason that the Western World is going thru a paradigm shift, of monumental proportions, with potentially monumental consequences. Our economies continue to teeter on the edge as the underlying problems, which first caused the financial collapse, still have not been addressed and countries, such as China, who do not share our idea of democracy, will become the new world superpowers.

Food for thought as we sleep walk into the Orwellian future of our creation.

[Pete McK]

On our way back from a short break we were waiting in yet an airport lounge and I picked up a copy of Der Spiegel, a German weekly news magazine along the lines of The Economist and Time Magazine all rolled into one, but with a weekly circulation of more than one million. I remember back when Emma was reading German at university, the furore the publication created in exposing the Flick Affair, where this massive German conglomerate had been bribing the Minister for Economic Affairs and as cohort of other members of the Bundestag for big favours.
 
So it was with interest that I read their reportage that the N$A and GCH$ had successfully inserted illegal access protocols into the Android, Apple and Blackberry operating systems, thus granting them back door access into all mobile phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.

In the internal documents they obtained, experts boast about successful access to iPhone data in instances where these agencies are able to infiltrate the computer a person uses to sync their iPhone. Mini-programs, so-called "scripts," then enable additional access to at least 38 iPhone features.

It also notes there was a period when the NSA was temporarily unable to access BlackBerry devices. After the Canadian company acquired another firm the same year, it changed the way in compresses its data, however the department responsible at Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency declared in a top secret document it had regained access to BlackBerry data and celebrated with the word, "Champagne!"

The same week the Guardian Newspaper was reporting that encryption software, including proprietary brands such as Steganos and free open-source disk encryption software, such as Truecrypt, all have backdoors that are routinely exploited the intelligence services and moreover by the police in specific requests to these agencies.

Nothing new I guess, yet something the general public seem to be indifferent to, often frequently believing in the false premise ‘Well I have done nothing wrong’ and ‘There is so much data they can never sift thru it all.’

Try telling ‘I have never done anything wrong’ to the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, or only last week the young man Barry White, who after 12 year in prison for the murder of his girlfriend, was released when they got the ‘right man’. Mobile phone data is becoming as important evidence at trial as DNA and both are potentially flawed and can be subject to misuse, from malicious intervention to errors in the system.

Data Sifting is the big new IT development area, where trends, movement patterns, associates are all linked and can be combined with everything from credit card activity to purchases thru amazon and eBay.

Maybe we are the sheep being led into an Orwellian future.

I turned off my Apple iPhone for the rest of the day

[Lost Soul]

In 1930's Germany and other European countries the Jews didn't think they were doing anything potentially harmful to them selves by declaring their religion on their medical (and other) records.  Guess what?  A systematic trawl of those records by the Gestapo et al very rapidly identified those who had to be shipped off to the gas chambers.

Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them.

[Callum]

Well said Lost Soul. When I was a lad my parents had some friends, Daniel and Anna, who were refugees from Germany and had left there in the mid 1930’s. I remember Daniel telling me that he had found it very hard to leave, not because they had to leave all their possessions behind, which they did, but because their relatives and friends were telling them not to over react. Didn’t somebody once say that history repeats itself?

[captain paranoia]

Whether or not we trust the various agencies to 'do the right thing', any system with backdoor access is fundamentally silly, since other people might find and exploit the backdoors, people who certainly cannot be trusted.

Now, if I worked for one of the aforementioned agencies, I might make my backdoor 'secure', using an access protocol that would protect against such subversion.  As opposed to something rather naive, like a plain text access to a 'hidden' port that no-one else is supposed to know about.

Now, a protocol that secure would be quite interesting, since it would have to be quite strong.  And probably stronger than anything that can be legally exported from, say, the USA.  I guess the difference is that such an encryption system wouldn't be intended to be used by the person whose device was hosting it...

I have no idea what access protocol is used, but I hope that if such backdoors do exist, they are adequately protected against third-party attacks.

Such backdoor mechanisms violate one of the rights defined by both the UN & EC Human Rights Charters; the right to privacy.



On a lighter note...  The Flick Affair?  Surely not Herr Flick of the Gestapo?  'Allo 'Allo, anyone...?

[MoonMan]

Interesting..the world economy is well overdue for a massive collapse, [Kondratiev cycle]. The creation of credit, that cannot be paid back,for the system is based on the fantasy that the more credit that one pours into the Magic Cauldron, the more real wealth will flow [trickle down] from it. Credit does not create wealth, it creates debt. The gamblers have picked their horses,but how many will finish the race? Knowing how to get by without electricity & refrigeration is a good place to start.